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Table Of Contents
15 Math Concepts Every Data Scientist Should Know
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In this section, we won’t go into the fundamentals of differential calculus, but instead just recap some basic results and notation. Therefore, we are assuming you already have some basic familiarity with differentiation and integration.
Let’s start with what the derivative of a function or curve
intuitively represents. An example curve is shown in Figure 1.5. The derivative of this function is denoted by the following symbol:

Eq. 29
The derivative of
is itself a function of
. The numerical value of the derivative evaluated at a particular value of
, let’s say at
, is the gradient (or slope) of the tangent to the curve
at
. As such, we can think of the derivative as defining the local gradient value of the curve. This is illustrated in Figure 1.5 as well:
Figure 1.5: The derivative as the gradient of the tangent to the curve
Sometimes, when we want to be explicit...